JUSTINE KURLAND – SINCERE AUTO CARE
2014-09-01Kurland is known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. For her last exhibition at the gallery, The Train is Bound for Glory (2009), Kurland spent two years driving through the expansive American West documenting trains in open vistas and the subculture of train-hoppers and drifters around them. The 2007 series Of Woman Born, also photographed on the road, features unclothed mothers and their children whom Kurland met and befriended along the way.
For her most recent series, on view in this exhibition, Kurland returns to a purely documentary style in the tradition of Walker Evans. Cars, the culture of the mechanic, and the open road are Kurland’s subjects, drawing on her 12 years of experience with life on the road. The photographs in Sincere Auto Care balance two competing narratives: the first is the car as an aspirational symbol of freedom, sex, the American Dream, and the second is the bleakness of daily life behind the scenes.
With this body of work, Kurland presents a reality where utopia and dystopia are not polar opposites, but rather fold together in an uneasy coexistence. The formal elegance of the photos and Kurland’s eye for teasing romance and beauty out of her subjects gives rise to a sense of detached optimism, or as Kurland herself describes, a place “where beauty is found not because the world is beautiful but because it is beautifully described.”
Opposite – Construction, Disputes, Training, 2014
Exhibition runs through to October 11th, 2014
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
534 West 26th Street
New York
NY 10001
